Chances are that, by now, you’ve already got Exchange Server 2013 Preview installed in your lab. High time to take a closer look at some of the things that have changed. In this article we’ll zoom in on some of the changes with regards to management of your Exchange Server 2013 (Preview).

Exchange Administrative Console (EAC)

One of the first things that will catch your eye will undeniably be the fact that the Exchange Management Console is missing. Indeed, the EMC has been replaced by a Web-Based GUI called Exchange Administrative Center (EAC). In fact, the EAC is kind of the successor of the Exchange Control Panel in Exchange 2010.

Right after you installed your server, you haven’t configured any URLs yet. The EAC will then typically be available at the following URL:

Note Because you haven’t installed any certificates yet, a certificate warning will be thrown when navigating to the page. At this point, it’s still okay and you can safely ignore the warning.

Next, you’ll hit the login page. Did you notice how “clean” the metro-style interface looks?

After logging in, you will be taken to the EAC:

From there you will be able to execute quite a lot of tasks. The EAC has been build to replace the EMC without having to bind in on the possibilities you, as an admin, have. The EAC allows you to perform most of the tasks you were able to do with EMC added with some new possibilities. Amongst these tasks are for example the management of:

Recipients

Connectors

Certificates

High Availability (DAGs)

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Compliance features (In-Place Hold, DLP, Retention Policies, …)

As you can see, most Administrators who are used to working with the EMC won’t have too much trouble getting along with EAC, as long as you don’t forget to turn of that pop-up blocker!Navigating the EAC is easy and pretty intuitive. Next to the trusted items like “Recipients”, “Organization” and “Servers”, you now have a single point of management for e.g. ActiveSync policies, RBAC management etc. In Exchange Server 2010 not all of these items were available from the EMC and required you to login to the Exchange Control Panel.

I encourage you to take a look around and play a bit with the EAC. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be posting some how-to’s regarding some of the management tasks and I will be regularly referring to the EAC.

PowerShell

PowerShell still rocks the Exchange world. The Exchange Management Shell is your one-stop management interface from where you can do virtually anything with your Exchange environment. While junior admins might revert to the comfort the EAC offers, more seasoned administrators will certainly love PowerShell: Exchange Server 2013 uses the Management Framework 3.0 and therefore it relies on the power of PowerShell v3.

If you haven’t checked out what PowerShell v3 can do for you, I suggest that you have a look at the following page. It contains a list of articles that might prove useful!

Prior to v3 (e.g. in Exchange Server 2010), the same query would have looked like this:

Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.Name –like “*partial*”}

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Although I still find that when writing bigger scripts the latter seems more orderly, the first example comes in pretty handy when doing some quick searches or some rough filtering.

Note these improvements are a general feature of PowerShell v3 and can be used anywhere you’re using PowerShell.

New Exchange 2013 Cmdlets

Exchange 2013 (Preview) brings along a bunch of new PowerShell commands. Although most of them are related to new features like e.g. Site Mailboxes, there are also some new test commands and some existing cmdlet ‘sets’ have been extended. For example, one of the commands that was added to the Mail Flow cmdlets is:

Redirect-Message

Note The help files are already available online! A quick search revealed the true purpose of this command:

As you can see, Office 2013 (Preview) commits to greater flexibility for the Administrator. I’m pretty excited to see the first scripts to pop up in the next few weeks and I’m sure there will be plenty to talk about in the future.

It’s also interesting to see how Exchange Server 2013 tends more to the cloud than ever before. Given that nowadays it’s all about BYOD, being mobile and being to work where and when you want, I believe that these improvements are for the better. The fact that you will be able to manage both Exchange on-premises as in the cloud from within a single Web-Interface, from virtually anywhere and almost every device is a HUGE leap forward.

Make sure to check back regularly as I will be posting more updates on Exchange Server 2013 in the upcoming days and weeks!